The Suburbanization of Manufacturing in Small Metropolitan Areas: a Case Study of Roanoke, Virginia

THE SUBURBANIZATION OF MANUFACTURING IN SMALL METROPOLITAN AREAS: A CASE STUDY OF ROANOKE, VIRGINIA Alfred W. Stuart* One of the critical factors in the “sprawl” of American cities is the chang­ ing intra-urban pattern of manufacturing establishments. Factories are not only important land users but also, of course, major employment sources. That the locations of manufacturing establishments within an urban complex have major implications for the location of other activities, such as resi­ dences, retail and service outlets, and the transportation network, is apparent although the actual causative relationships are not so obvious. The impli­ cations are generally serious because the lateral expansion of these activities tends to take place more rapidly than does the realignment of political-jurisdictional areas. Geographers and others have become aware of the fundamental shifts in the intra-urban manufacturing location pattern and have demonstrated that the predominant trend is centrifugal, or away from the original center of the urban complex. (I ) The term “suburbanization” is employed to identify this trend, or more precisely, to indicate a process which, operating through time, causes manufacturing activities to grow more rapidly in the periphery of an urban area than near the center. Terms such as dispersion, decentralization, and diffusion are deemed less adequate to describe this process. Most of the studies which provide the evidence that suburbanization is the dominant trend in intra-urban manufacturing spatial patterns are con­ cerned with the nation’s largest cities. Largely neglected have been the smaller metropolitan areas, particularly those with central city populations of less than about 200,000 persons. Frequently it is implied in these studies that the rate of suburbanization is a direct function of city size and that the process is less intense, and therefore less significant, in smaller metropolitan areas. Zelinsky (2) drew even more explicit conclusions from a study of national data for the 1947-1954 period, stating that suburbanization in­ creased directly with city size and that centralization, the opposite trend, was the rule in urban areas whose central city populations were less than 200,000 persons. More needs to be known about the operation of industrial suburbanization in smaller metropolitan areas. Planners, frequently working under pressing deadlines, often simply extrapolate the findings of studies of other areas and apply them to their own situations. The hazards in such a procedure are clearly evident. The land-use planner working on a small metropolitan area might conclude, for example, that manufacturing can be expected to require *Dr. S tu art is a ssista n t p rofessor of geography at the U n iversity of Tennessee, K no xville. The pap er w as accepted fo r p u b lic a tio n in A p ril 1968. 24 T h e S o u t h e a s t e r n G e o g r a p h e r considerable space within the urban center, roughly in the same general areas now occupied by manufacturing establishments. The land-use plan and subsequent zoning ordinances, renewal projects, and other space-use controls may be premised on the assumption of continued and probably en­ larged manufacturing space needs well within the central city. But it would be an unhappy situation if manufacturers, present and future, then ignored newly developed and heavily subsidized central sites and put their plants in the suburbs. Clearily, there is a need for research on the matte*. At the theoretical level, Zelinsky (3) in effect has postulated an hypothesis which states that there is a direct correlation between city size and the rate of industrial suburbanization. However, while there is supporting evidence at the upper level of city size, it has not been established that the hypothesis is workable at the lower end of the size scale. The hypothesis may be valid at given points in time in the past but there is no assurance that the pro­ posed correlation might not diminish or even reverse in the forseeable future. After all, suburbanization could become so complete in large areas that between subsequent time periods the trend might appear to be that of centralization. In any event, the size-intensity hypothesis of manufacturing suburbanization needs further...